A story out of Corpus Christi Texas has just sent my mind reeling. First I will credit Todd Starnes of Fox News for bringing this to my attention and say any quotes in this story are from his report on this incident. Let’s begin with the insanity.

It seems a business owner in Corpus Christi like to keep the front of his restaurant clean. One day he was washing bid poop off the sidewalk of his establishment. What happened next borders on the ridiculous.

A restaurant owner in Corpus Christi, Texas is furious after city officials threatened him with a $2,000 fine for using a garden hose to wash away bird droppings on the sidewalk in front of his business.

“They told me I can’t wash it off because I’m polluting,” said John Webb, general manager of Crawdaddy’s, a family-owned restaurant in downtown. “It’s like they want me to go out of business.”

Huh? Washing bird droppings is polluting? How is that possible. Birds poop on the surface of the earth quite often and I have never heard of it being a pollutant. So the business owner very wisely asked the city official for guidance. What comes next is sublime.

“For the last 18 years we’ve just been washing it off with a water hose,” he said. “But a guy from the city came out here and told me if I washed my sidewalk off again I was going to get a fine.”

Webb said he was threatened with a $2,000 fine.

“He said ‘Well, you can’t wash it off because you’re polluting,’” he recalled.

The city official reportedly told Webb that he had two options – he could either hire a professional cleaning crew to remove the bird poop – or he could just let the rain wash it away. Webb said he was dumbfounded.

I was dumbfounded too. Bear in mind this is Texas, one of the states with the least regulations on many things in the country. So let’s break this conversation down. If I hire a clean up crew to remove small splats of bird droppings from my sidewalk what would that do to my expense line? How would that effect my work force? More importantly if I let the rain fall wash it away how effective will that be and where would the runoff go? You got it the same place it will go if I wash it off.

The article cited the city official as saying this.

Webb said he was told that civilians cannot wash away bird droppings because it was “against city, state and federal law – I was polluting the bay.”